Teen Justin Carter Jailed In Texas After Making Sarcastic Threat In Facebook Comment

[The Straight Story]

Teen Justin Carter Jailed In Texas After Making Sarcastic Threat In Facebook Comment

Maybe it's time the Internet adopted a "sarcasm" tag to alert readers to the use of irony in online conversation, and, hopefully, avoid situations like that of Justin Carter, a Texas teenager who has been in jail since February over a Facebook comment that failed to make a woman in Canada LOL.

Earlier this year, Carter and a friend got into an Facebook argument with someone regarding "League of Legends," an online video game with notoriously die-hard fans. Justin's father, Jack, explained to ABC local affiliate KVUE that at the end of the conversation "[s]omeone had said something to the effect of 'Oh you're insane, you're crazy, you're messed up in the head,’ to which [Justin] replied 'Oh yeah, I'm real messed up in the head, I'm going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts,’ and the next two lines were lol and jk [all sic]."

In case you've never been online before today: Internet shorthand LOL stands for "laughing out loud"; JK means "just kidding."

A woman in Canada who came across the boy's post failed to see the humor, however, and alerted police after Internet research revealed Carter, who was 18 at the time of the incident, lived near an elementary school. Carter was taken into custody and charged with making a "terroristic" threat.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/27/teenager-justin-carter-facebook-comment-jail_n_3512025.html

[PDJane]

1. Jesus. Don't these people have anything better to do with their time?

The whole damn world has gone completely nuts.

[Captain Stern]

2. Oh man, I was hoping this was one of those things where somebody overreacted...

...and then it got fixed when reasonable people stepped in, and we could just laugh about what a silly misunderstanding it was .....But evidently this kid has been in jail since February for making a joke. (Even a really bad joke shouldn't get you more than two weeks in jail).